The Face of the Assassin Part 7

But the reality of detail was extraordinary, and the face was the most lifelike creation Bern had ever seen. He could even see the pores in the flesh, and moisture in the caruncula lacrimalis, the pinkish tissue in the corners of the eyes. This was striking and gave Bern an uneasy feeling. The reality was . . . shocking. How in the h.e.l.l could the artist have done this?

He moved to another face. A young woman, a Mayan Indian, he thought. A stunning creation. The subtle colors and texture of the tissue as it changed from one part of the face to the other, from cheek to lip to eyelid, were exceptional.

He moved to a third, a blond woman, of German descent perhaps. The same subtle changes in flesh tissue were far superior to any sculpture he had ever seen.

"A marvelous thing, isn't it?" a voice behind him said, and Bern turned, to find a tall, thin man standing in a web of shadows about twenty feet away. His face was hidden, but Bern recognized the sophisticated voice and its odd impediment. Mondragon was dressed in a dark, elegantly cut suit. He wore a crisp white s.h.i.+rt that luminesced in the low, warm light of the room. His silk tie was a deep amethyst color.

"Yes," Bern said. "Someone has an extraordinary talent."

"Indeed." Mondragon paused. And then as he took another step toward Bern, he said, "Mr. Bern, I should have prepared you. As I move into the light, you will see that unlike these unfortunate people you see here"-he indicated the display cases with a gentle sweep of his arm-"who have a face but no body"-he took another step, which slowly brought him out of the shadows-"I suffer just the opposite misfortune . . . of having a body but no face."

Mondragon stepped into the pool of light between them, and Bern almost staggered. Nearly all of the epidermis had been removed from Mondragon's face, as well as much of the muscle tissue and cartilage. The place where his face had been was a nearly flat, raw, glistening plane. His eyes seemed to bulge from their sockets, an illusion due to the absence of eyelids and surrounding tissue. His nose was gone and the triangular nasal aperture that remained was covered with a translucent film that allowed a visual hint of the nasal spine. His cheeks were missing and much of the jaw tissue. His lips remained, but the cartilage where his chin had been was gone, so that the sharp lines of the jawbone immediately presented the framework of the skull.

He was standing directly under one of the hidden lights, and Bern could not make himself turn his gaze away from the truly hideous sight.

In comparison to his stripped-away face, Mondragon's lips appeared abnormally protuberant, though this, too, was an illusion, resulting from the absence of so much facial tissue. The reality was that Mondragon had no features except eyeb.a.l.l.s and lips. Without these, Bern would not have known that this raw, glistening ma.s.s that he was looking at was the remains of a man's face.

"Get a good look, Mr. Bern. Accept your curiosity for what it is and satisfy yourself. I have accepted the fact that I am a spectacle, and the sooner you accept it, too, the sooner we can talk about far more important things."

Mondragon moved closer to Bern, who resisted an impulse to step back. Mondragon raised his hand and spritzed his face with a small mister he carried in his palm. The beads of moisture glittered momentarily in the shaft of light before dissipating.

"You can hardly see it," Mondragon said, "but my . . . facade"-his tone s.h.i.+fted to sarcastic irony-"is covered by a sheer, transparent membrane. A marvel of modern medicine. It's an antiseptic barrier. But it breathes and requires moisture. The spray also contains a necessarily potent a.n.a.lgesic."

He turned his head slightly, allowing Bern to get a look at him from a different angle. His naked eyes seemed to be operated by remote control. The facial flaying ran just below his hairline, in front of each ear, and dipped down just in front of his throat.

Bern could see that his lips had been carved around and isolated from the rest of the mess in a very precise way. A bit of the philtrum remained in the upper lip, as well as a bit of the mentol.a.b.i.al furrow in the lower. But the surrounding flesh had been peeled away up to the corners of the mouth, causing it to seem to float, almost unattached, just above the surrounding raw tissue. Obviously, Mondragon had suffered extensive nerve and muscle damage in this area, and he must have gone through a great deal of therapy to be able to speak with only this small degree of impediment.

"I am only weeks away from beginning a lifetime of surgeries and skin grafts," Mondragon's mouth said. He turned his walleyed stare toward Bern again. "I'll never have anything that you could call a proper face, but I will have a . . . sheath of sorts, to dampen the repulsion that others feel at seeing . . . this."

Bern didn't know what to say. He wasn't repulsed, but his fascination did make him self-conscious. Still, he stared. In some places, the excising had been deep, gouging into the subcutaneous tissue and well into the muscle itself. Without skin or features, it was impossible to convey an expression.

"Do you have any questions about . . . this?" Mondragon asked. He behaved almost as if he were in an anatomy cla.s.s and the body in question had nothing to do with him at all. Except it did, which made his detachment seem abnormally cold, and his pretense that his flayed face was something they could get past in just a few moments of intense observation seemed, in itself, pathological.

Bern said nothing.

"Then we're through with the anatomy lesson?" Mondragon stared at him and spritzed his face again. "Good. This way, then."

Chapter 15.

He turned and Bern followed him to a corner of the twilight near the windows that overlooked the city. In the near distance, downtown, one of the city's several satellite cl.u.s.ters of skysc.r.a.pers rose in the night sky. They went down one step to a grouping of armchairs and sofas that went right up to the gla.s.s wall. Mondragon sat in an armchair, his head and feet in shadow, a band of soft light falling obliquely across the middle of his elegantly attired body. Bern chose a chair at an angle to Mondragon.

From the surrounding shadows, the young woman appeared and set a drink on a short black acrylic pedestal at Mondragon's elbow. She bent down, her lovely face disappearing into the shadow with Mondragon's wraith. Bern heard the hissing of sibilants as she whispered. It was an odd tableau, two beautifully attired bodies, their heads lost in lightless, silent communion.

Then the young woman straightened up and walked out of the room.

"It's ironic," Mondragon said, "that you are a forensic artist . . . considering." He paused, then gestured toward the area behind Bern where the clear acrylic display boxes held their fine sculptures. "What do you think of my exhibition?"

"Beautiful," Bern said. "Extraordinarily well done."

"These are my favorites," Mondragon said. "I have others, nearly fifty altogether."

"Who sculpted them?"

"G.o.d." A soft aspirated laugh came from the shadow. "Those are real faces," Mondragon said.

Real faces. Bern couldn't help glancing toward the darkened s.p.a.ce where the softly illuminated display cases floated in the murk. As he recalled the stippled texture of the skin and the delicate vermilion borders of the lips, a sense of the bizarre crept into the room.

"Plastination," Mondragon said. "Plastination."

"Gunther von Hagens?" Bern asked.

"Exactly." Mondragon was pleased that Bern knew who the man was. "He invented the process, replacing the water and fat in a specimen with a variety of polymers that render the tissue permanently preserved in a state of near reality. The process is rather complex. Von Hagens did not prepare these particular ones. They were done by someone with a more artistic sensitivity, a familiarity with aesthetics. She improved on the more crude medical specimens that are usually a.s.sociated with von Hagens's work."

Though Bern was nearly as intimate with cadavers as a pathologist or a mortician, this display of faces struck him as ghoulish. Perhaps it was the motivation for the display, rather than the actual display itself, that was slightly creepy.

"It's remarkable," Mondragon said, "how thoughtlessly we take our faces for granted."

He paused a moment, a break signaling a change of subject.

"I don't know who has involved you in this," Mondragon began. "I don't know who was responsible for sending you your brother's skull."

"How did you know about it, then?"

"Your brother was near the center of a complex intelligence operation," Mondragon said. "Among the people who orbit around such an enterprise as this, everyone knows everything. And no one knows much. This isn't a contradiction. It is, unfortunately, the reality of much of the intelligence world these days. This is why I know what has happened to you, but I don't know who did it. Or why."

"Intelligence operation? What do you mean?" operation? What do you mean?"

"Jude was an operations officer in the CIA," Mondragon said. "A special kind of operations officer."

Bern was taken aback. This was a h.e.l.l of a revelation. Suddenly, he was skeptical.

"And how do you happen to know all this?"

"I'm an a.s.set to the U.S. intelligence community in . . . several enterprises."

Bern didn't know what to say. So why was he here? What was going on here? Before he could speak, Mondragon did.

"Tell me," Mondragon said, "what do you intend to do about this?"

"Do about it?"

"Yes. Before you heard from me, where were you going to go with your knowledge, which will be confirmed by the DNA results tomorrow?"

Bern noted the positive use of the future tense, and he answered him honestly. "I don't know."

"I have a proposition, then," Mondragon said. "Let me help you find out who did this."

"Why?"

Mondragon hesitated. "Because I have suspicions, and if I'm right, then I have business with this person."

This sounded ominous, and Bern was getting the uneasy feeling that he should have declined the invitation to this meeting.

"I don't know that I care who did it."

"That's difficult for me to believe," Mondragon said, a hint of displeasure in his voice.

Mondragon studied him. It was a little disturbing to see so much of the man's eyeb.a.l.l.s. With no eyelids, he couldn't blink, and Bern realized that the spritzing was also intended to supply moisture to his eyes.

"Your brother was involved in a part of that agency that didn't even exist a year ago," Mondragon said, reaching for his tall c.o.c.ktail gla.s.s and bringing it to his lips. His eyeb.a.l.l.s swiveled downward as he drank. Very deliberately, he set the gla.s.s on the short pedestal, and his eyeb.a.l.l.s jerked back to Bern.

"He used to be a case officer in South America, but in the recent reorganization of things, some people with special talents were s.h.i.+fted to new . . . clandestine operations. Have you ever heard of the Triple Border region of South America?"

"I've heard of it."

"It's that area where the borders of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay come together. Jungle. Everything there is untamed-the animals, the vegetation, the people. Two cities have sprung up out of the jungle there, one on either side of the wide Parana River: Ciudad del Este in Paraguay, and Foz do Iguacu in Brazil. Ciudad del Este has been around for thirty years and has always been a retreat for smugglers and murderers and anyone seeking the comfort of a society of outcasts.

"The area has prospered as a refuge for international terrorists and criminals. Today, commerce is flourish- ing there: There are over two hundred thousand peo- ple, shopping malls, apartment buildings. Everything. And everything is lawless. Chaos lives there, and she is thriving."

Mondragon stopped and spritzed his face, and again the mist dazzled momentarily in the angle of the dim lights, then disappeared.

"The underworld there-if one can distinguish such a thing in such a place-is run by Asians and Middle Eastern criminals. There are tens of thousands of Muslims there, among them Hezbollah terrorists. But they are not alone. This lawless place is the refuge of Hamas, as well, and the Aryan Nations. And the IRA. And Colombian rebels. This place is the lair of the scourge of the earth. They fester there, breed there, give birth there."

Mondragon picked up his gla.s.s again, drank, and put it back. There was a moment when his head came into the dim light, and the horror of his butchered face was shocking in the surrounding elegance. His eyes and lips were startlingly out of place in the featureless ma.s.s of moist, decorticated flesh.

"U.S. intelligence has known about this cesspool for a decade, but it wasn't a primary concern. Just something they kept their eyes on. Now, of course, it seems more important to them. The Hezbollah element there being the most important of all.

"Your brother was involved in an operation that was trying to locate a Hezbollah operative named Ghazi Baida. Baida is a terrorist strategist, and increasingly reliable intelligence has placed him in various cities throughout Latin America in the last ten months: Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Rio de Janeiro, Asuncion, and . . . Ciudad del Este.

"The U.S. intelligence community was very alarmed about these reports, and they initiated an intense search for Baida. Your brother was at the heart of an operation to locate him. His work placed him in enormously risky situations. Six weeks ago, he disappeared."

"Six weeks? Only six weeks?"

"Yes. That surprises you?"

"A little. I was told-"

"By this woman who brought the skull?"

"Yes . . . that he'd disappeared four months ago."

"No," Mondragon said curtly. "It was only six weeks ago."

All of this was coming fast. Bern's curiosity was taking him further than he had imagined it would. Common sense should have kicked in long ago. It would have said: Go to your lawyer and tell him someone has brought you your twin brother's skull in a box, a brother you never knew you had. Then ask him what in the h.e.l.l you should do now.

Mondragon leaned forward slightly in his chair, nearly enough to expose his face. He seemed to want to speak carefully.

"Mr. Bern," he said, "your brother was . . . important in his secret world. It is a small world, one in which decisions are made and things are done that have ramifications in times and places far removed from him. The people he worked for knew more about him than he knew about himself. That is not uncommon in his profession. That is the way his world handles its business. He knew that, and he accepted it."

The implication was that Bern would be wise to do the same.

"Look," Bern said. "All this is a good story, but I don't know who in the h.e.l.l you really are. I don't know if you're telling me the truth about . . . my brother, about his being an intelligence officer, about the CIA . . . about anything. I don't even know if I should be sitting here talking to you. This doesn't exactly feel right to me."

"'Feel right'?" Mondragon's tone was laden with disdain. "I see. Well, Mr. Bern, tell me, what would you require to make you comfortable with talking to me and believing what I have to say?"

"What would I require?" That was a good question, and it was like calling a raise in a poker game. Did Bern even want to stay in? He guessed so. Instead of walking away from this, here he was talking to a man without a face and allowing himself to be drawn, almost moment by moment, deeper and deeper into what any fool could see was a dangerously murky business.

And yet, even as it was happening, he wondered if his willingness to continue with this had something to do with his newly discovered second self. Did the same elements in Jude's DNA that had made him seek a life in this foggy world of espionage that Mondragon was describing now provide Bern the wherewithal to follow him . . . a little way, at least? It was a gravitational pull that was difficult to resist.

"I know a guy in the Houston Police Department's Intelligence Division," Bern heard himself say. "If he told me I was in good company, I'd believe him."

"What is his name?" Mondragon asked.

"Mitch.e.l.l Cooper."

Mondragon nodded. "I'm going to leave you for a little while and make a phone call. When I return, we can continue to talk."

He rose to his feet and walked away into the shadows, and almost immediately the young woman appeared again. This time, she actually seemed to see Bern and smiled.

"I understand you may want something to drink," she said.

She was right about that. "Tanqueray and tonic," he said. "And a good slice of lime, if you have it."

She nodded and left. Bern took a deep breath. This thing did not reach a point of correction. It just kept going and going further out into the unknown, breaking all bonds of gravity as it went. What was going to bring him back?

The woman returned with his drink, and he sat alone, waiting, drinking. The gin was welcome. Several times, he turned and looked back toward the floating faces. Jesus. He stared at the city glittering in the darkness behind the chair where Mondragon had been sitting. This was an evening he wasn't likely to forget very soon.

He had almost finished his drink when the woman reappeared and approached him, handing him a cell phone.

"Mr. Cooper," she said.

Bern took the phone, clearing his throat. "Mitch.e.l.l?"

"Yeah, Paul. You okay?"

"I'm fine, sure. I appreciate the call."

"Well, look, I, uh, I guess you know what this is all about. I just got a call from a friend of mine, who's going to have to remain nameless. He, uh, he's CIA, Paul. Maybe you actually know more here than I do."

He paused, inviting a response, but Bern didn't seize the opportunity. Cooper went on.

"Anyway, I guess the point is that I've known this man a lot of years, in intelligence work, and he's . . . reliable. I trust him. I understand you need to know that. I'd trust him with whatever I had to. He told me that you're talking to a guy-wouldn't give me his name-and my man says he's to be trusted, too. You can believe him, okay?"